Augsburg College Implements Cloud-Based Backup Solution

Augsburg College in Minnesota has replaced its legacy backup system with a cloud-based solution that has reduced the amount of time system administrators spend managing backups and has reduced the amount of storage space required for backups.

The college had been using Symantec Backup Exec software to conduct weekly backups to disk and then backup those disks to tape. This system required a great deal of the system administrators' time and 117 terabytes of physical storage for a year's worth of data. The team recognized that the amount of data being backed up would continue to grow each year and that it needed to identify a more sustainable solution. After evaluating several backup solutions, the college decided on CrashPlan PROe from Code42.

CrashPlan PROe is an enterprise cloud-backup solution. According to the company, the college selected CrashPlan PROe for its data-deduplication, self-managed archives, scalable hybrid cloud, and cross-platform support. The data deduplication and compression has enabled the college to reduce the size of its backups from 117 terabytes to only 12 terabytes, and the self-managed archives have significantly reduced the time demands on the college's IT team.

According to information on the CrashPlan site, the solution supports Mac, PC, Linux, and Solaris platforms and offers unlimited storage, file size, versions, and archives. Administrators have the option of backing up data locally, to the cloud, or both, and data is secured with 448-bit encryption before transfer across the local or wide area network. The system uses a backup verification process to monitor the health of backup archives on an ongoing basis, and users can recover backed up files based on the date, time, or incremental version.

"Before CrashPlan, it took a lot of extra work to get a truly comprehensive view of full backups," said Matthew Galloway, systems administrator for Augsburg College, in a prepared statement. "I had to compare data sets from different dates, look at file modification dates and even get tape from the vault. With CrashPlan, it's so much easier, and it saves time — I just press a button."

Augsburg College is a private liberal arts college located in Minneapolis, MN. The college serves approximately 3,700 students and employs 600 faculty and staff members.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.